The fashion world is constantly experiencing flux as couture and avant-garde enter the mainstream consumer market. The fashion designers desire fresh and unique approaches to creating fashion apparel, while fashion conscience consumers desire sophisticated and unique approaches to clothing designs, novel materials and the up-to-the-moment fashion trends.
Animal hide is a commonly used material in manufacturing clothing. However, animal hide cannot retain its form unless the hide is stitched, punched, or stretched. For example, cobbling, or the art of shoemaking, involves stitching soft, thin animal hide to manufacture shoes. Soft, thin leather cannot otherwise be held together and worn on a person's foot. Stitching animal hide may effectively retain the desired shape but the hide itself may in turn become marred or damaged during the process. Moreover, when the leather is stretched to a shoe last, it is secured with small nail heads which are never removed in order to hold the shape of the last once the last is removed or the formed leather is secured in the formed shape by stitching or gluing the leather to other elements of the shoe (e.g., an inner sole, outer sole, or the like). Punching generally involves fitting a rubber mold with an animal hide, heating the animal hide, applying pressure to the heated animal hide, and shaping the animal hide to conform to the mold. The punched animal hide will then retain the mold's shape. The time and labor involved to create the initial rubber mold are high and make this process inefficient for manufacturing garments having certain features. Features such as lapels, cuffs, pleats and the like are too difficult to incorporate into such molds, and thus punching is not a desirable method.
In addition, other industries employ animal hides as well. For example, milliners employ animal hides to manufacture women's hats. Artists also sometime employ animal hides to create their works of art. The historical methods of stitching and punching for the reasons already mentioned may not be the most desirable or successful manufacturing technique.
Accordingly, there exists a need for a method for shaping animal hide that allows a designer of fashion apparel and accessories to incorporate certain garment features without incurring additional time, labor and costs, or an artist to create works of art without adulterating the starting material.